1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for managing stability of a link coupling an adapter of a computing system to a port of a networking device for in-band data communications.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
In data centers today that house many computers coupled to one another for data communications, link failure between those computers can negatively impact performance of the entire data center. Such networking errors today are only reported on networking devices, such as switches and routers, coupling the computers for data centers. Such reports are gathered and monitored by management software. When the management software identifies such a network error, the management software today either disables or restarts the port of the networking device reporting the networking error or fails over to another port or networking device. By relying solely on information from the perspective of the networking device, networking errors are often diagnosed incorrectly.